Sanitas assures clinics of reliable, secure access to critical cloud applications with the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform

Sanitas invests in cutting-edge technology to transform healthcare and drive growth, with nearly all of its clinical and business applications hosted in the cloud. But network circuit issues, undetected by its legacy Cisco Meraki SD-WAN, disrupted access, degraded VoIP calls, and negatively impacted patient services at Sanitas clinics.

The problem was, Cisco Meraki simply didn’t have the application-specific awareness and granular control to identify things like packet loss, forcing network engineer Victor Vega into constant reactive mode, often requiring time-consuming manual WAN management to reroute traffic. “I was only finding out about network problems when people couldn’t connect to their applications,” he says. “I shouldn’t have to rely on word of mouth like that.”

End-to-End SD-WAN Features Unified on One Platform

Vega wanted the ability to proactively identify issues such as packet loss and automatically redirect traffic, but he found that the existing Cisco Meraki solution fell short. Making the solution work would have required a large capital investment and backhauling all application traffic through a central data center—directly conflicting with the company’s cloud-first strategy.

Vega knew there had to be a better way and initially considered solutions from Aryaka and Fortinet. He then consulted with his partner Compuquip—trusted network and security experts—who recommended Aruba (formerly Silver Peak). The fact that Aruba EdgeConnect is positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure factored heavily into Vega’s decision. He also liked that the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform offers application-specific routing and can automatically determine the optimal path for application traffic across multiple circuits based on business need.

“Aruba EdgeConnect has all the SD-WAN capabilities we need baked in,” Vega notes. “Before, if I wanted to prioritize traffic to make sure it’s going across the right path, it was all IP-based and required me to write 30-something rules. EdgeConnect does this automatically for us based on application type.”

Delivers Higher Performance and Uptime

Sanitas has numerous locations across the U.S., many bound to contracts with Cisco Meraki. Therefore, Vega is first deploying the Aruba EdgeConnect platform at the company’s recently acquired clinics in Tennessee and Texas. Ultimately, he will replace the entire Cisco Meraki infrastructure with Aruba EdgeConnect, eventually spanning 60-plus locations.

Currently, the Aruba EdgeConnect platform connects the Tennessee and Texas clinics directly to cloud-based applications such as electronic medical records (EMR)—eClinicalWorks EMR System—as well as a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) running in Microsoft Azure, an 8x8 VoIP system, and the Microsoft Office 365 suite, including Microsoft Teams.

With its technical capabilities, such as the ability to bond and use multiple WAN circuits simultaneously, automatically perform sub-millisecond failover, and centrally apply quality of service (QoS) policies, EdgeConnect improved application performance and availability dramatically. Vega says, “Since we deployed EdgeConnect there has been no network downtime and employees can access the applications they need without a problem. With QoS we no longer have any VoIP issues like before. Images load faster. Everything works better.”

Strong security on-site to the cloud

Vega also centrally orchestrates the Aruba EdgeConnect platform in concert with Palo Alto Networks Prisma cloud-delivered security. Vega configured a business intent overlay using the Aruba Orchestrator management console to route all critical cloud applications from EdgeConnect to Prisma for inspection. He also configured another business intent overlay for real-time applications such as VoIP and Teams.

Additionally, Vega takes advantage of the stateful zone-based firewall unified on the Aruba EdgeConnect platform to segment traffic. For example, application data is in a separate zone from VoIP, data from IoT devices such as surveillance cameras is on another zone, and credit card transactions are segmented on their own dedicated zone.

“I was able to easily configure unique security policies for each zone, so cloud traffic isn’t trying to cross our LAN,” Vega points out. “Being able to segment our credit card data was especially important to maintain PCI regulatory compliance and keep those transactions securely isolated from other data on our network.”

No More Headaches

With Aruba Orchestrator, Vega has much greater visibility into the SD-WAN and simplified management. Using templates, he can easily push out updates or security policies centrally with no need to log into each appliance individually. Deploying new sites is also much faster. “It took me 15 to 25 minutes to deploy a site on Cisco Meraki,” Vega says. “Now I can bring up a new site in as little as five minutes with just a few mouse clicks, thanks to the templates in Orchestrator.”

Orchestrator dashboards also provide a wealth of information that was difficult to collect previously. “I can easily see who is talking the most, what domains they’re going to, and have our security person block access if necessary. We didn’t have that level of visibility before.”

Vega adds, “I also like being able to see a health map of my entire network and drill down to each appliance to see if there is any packet loss, jitter or other issues. That required a separate license on Cisco Meraki. We have a lot more information than before without additional cost. Managing the network is no longer a headache for me, and our clinic staff now enjoy more reliable application performance with a higher quality of experience. Ultimately, that means more responsive, efficient care delivered to our patients.”